


fortunate travelers

by viviandarkbloom



Series: cities of illumination [5]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 07:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14890179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: This is sort-of new. A few years ago I had wanted to write a coda of sorts to this series. The first two chapters are the result of that (and a draft had been posted on livejournal & tumblr under a different name). It remained unfinished until I got the idea to incorporate a short vignette I'd written for a Valentine's Day prompt (also a while ago) that seemed to fit and made it complete. Or so I think!





	fortunate travelers

_Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me._

—Richard Siken, “Crush”

 

**1\. The American Athena**

_1973, Venice_

At twilight tourists glut Venice’s Cannaregio district, a _sestieri_ praised for its sunsets in any number of travel books; these northernmost points of the city offer romantic solitude—if one could but find an area of seclusion. A vermillion pointillist haze settles around the buildings and the streets. Everything at a distance is a beautiful blur; but at close range and contained within reflected light, the very fiber of Venice breathes, the city is a membrane through which motes of dust and dirt and people move through golden air.

Francesca ignores the foreigners, the flawless sunset. This evening she is driven to cut through aimless, strolling crowds, her aggressive, assured walk a pertinent reminder to the visitors that these streets were hers—this assuming they paid attention to the manner of her movement rather than her looks. She scowled at the singsong _buono seras_ from drunken Germans and another man staring at her hungrily, curling an English version of Fodor’s in his hands. Months ago she would have had his money out of his pockets and his cock out of his pants in a matter of skilled minutes—in an alley, in a hotel room, it didn’t matter. _Il negoziatore,_ Marcella jokingly calls her: the negotiator. She turns age-old barter into an art form. It is the recurring moment in her life when she believes herself most triumphant, receiving money in exchange for a series of dilatory actions masquerading as passion incarnate. She takes a sharp, expert turn down a menacing _calle_ with crumbling stone steps, moving with the grim, graceful determination of someone pursued not by lust or money but the kind of immolating truth that compels seeking oblivion—or, in Francesca’s case, getting as fucking high as possible.

Marcella’s apartment off San Girolamo is the crash pad of the moment, largely due to Marcella taking up with a generous Moroccan who has a sweet smile, sticky opiate fingers, and piles of jazz records. When Francesca arrives he is alone among the dregs of last night’s party, dreamily wiping a Miles Davis album with a lint cloth, each tilt of the record sending perfect gossamer circles of light spinning along the wax treads. How he makes his beatific solitude among this mess comforting and not pathetic puzzles her, but he is above it all and it provokes her petulant envy. He greets her sulk with a smile and indulgently shoves the hash pipe in her direction; because she is Marcella’s closest friend, she always receives it for free. When enough hash courses through her veins she slumps into the sofa, closes her eyes, and surrenders to the turntable’s soothing intricacies.

It seems as if no sooner has she settled in than the Moroccan speaks to her. She opens his eyes. He stands beside the decrepit, olive-colored sofa and his thin lips, his trimmed beard, mesmerize her; it is as if Jesus speaks to her with an incomprehensible divinity, spoken with slow carefulness in English crowned with an unfamiliar exotic accent, rattling off words she only partly comprehends: “Acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance, and psalm.”

Like lead screens Francesca’s eyelids are weighted and blinding, her vision blurred and sliding like paint dragged across a canvas. “What?” she murmurs.

“Acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance, and psalm,” the Moroccan repeats, beaming. “It is Coltrane’s _Love Supreme_. You must like it—you smile the whole time it plays!”

 _Time._ How much time has passed? _Supreme._ Another word cast into the wide net of the English language. _Like superior, super?_ She would have to ask Melinda. She would have to write down words again. The last time they were together she had an entire list of them scribbled on a piece of paper, awkwardly fished out of her jeans pocket, and nervously crumpled as Melinda’s kiss and caress triumphed over the pursuit of knowledge.

The noise of the paper, however, had been a siren call to the aging translator. She removed her hand from under Francesca’s t-shirt and rescued the paper from being surreptitiously tossed onto the floor. “What is this?”

The unexpected appearance of her ignorant list made Francesca feel foolish. “Words. Just words—I want to know.”

“Ah.” Melinda experimented with reading the list sans glasses: adjusting the length of her arm, squinting then widening her eyes, each gesture and every movement a careful calibration of Francesca’s affection, placing her on the verge of a greater, genuine emotion. And as this woman she was falling in love with read aloud the first word on the list— _matitudinal_ —the serpentine flow of syllables in that rich voice wrecked Francesca.

“Old French, from Latin, _matutinus_ —meaning, ‘of the morning.’” Melinda smiled and traced Francesca’s lips with the firm, dry tip of her thumb. “Where did you come across a word like that?”

Months ago a trick—an Englishman who, in the throes of severe infatuation had seriously overestimated his love object’s facility with his native tongue—had given Francesca a copy of _Lolita._ Diligently she struggled through the first forty pages or so before getting the filthy gist of the book and unceremoniously depositing it into the canal off the Riva degli Schiavoni, across from the San Giorgio Maggiore church. If she felt the slightest bit guilty for drowning _Lolita,_ it was only because she imagined that Melinda would disapprove of treating any book in such a fashion; just because a book is of no use to one person, she once pointed out, does not mean it would be so for another.

Context, Melinda always said, was so important.

Now gripped in the lovely tandem of hash and Coltrane an angel appears to Francesca—resembling Terence Stamp a bit, or perhaps the fellow who played the angel in _Barbarella_ —beautiful and golden, wings twitching and alive, so alive that she can reach out and touch the disturbance of air and the shedding feathers tickling her fingers as they fall at her booted feet. The angel asks with tender impertinence, and the slightest trace of a rough British accent that lends an oddly logical credence to her hallucination, _Would you like to be a Tadzio or a Lolita, Francesca?_

Somehow, she thinks, the decision has already been made.

The Cockney angel confirms it: _Right, then. I’m saying you’re Tadzio—after all, she claimed you first, anointed you, shall we say, with your title. It’s a gift. You don’t know it yet. But it’s a gift. You’ll find out in time._  

 _Time._ How many minutes or hours have passed before Ottavio’s arrival? In an attempt to rouse her, her brother squeezes her arm. His teasing voice—singularly affectionate among the loud, rowdy faggots accompanying him, all of them pestering the Moroccan for his bountiful wares—finally pierces the penumbra of her troubled bliss: “Wake up, Francy. Ah, fuck. You’re still out of it, eh?” Affectionately he cups her face.

She stares up at him, this stranger using her childhood nickname and virtually unrecognizable from the lithe, delicate boy she grew up with. Sofia had always said that he was the pretty one: _He is more beautiful than you,_ _but you are stronger. You will come out of this all in one piece._ With his shorn hair and bristling mustache, Ottavio now emulates the machismo of his American tricks, who flatter and encourage his rough glamour by telling him he looks like Franco Nero.

“You check your bank account lately?” he croons. Before she can reply— her lips move with glacial slowness—he continues: “It was my day with Mosca from the bank. Do you know, in the middle of sucking me off he stops to say, ‘Your sister is a wealthy woman now. There was a huge deposit for her today.’ Can you fucking believe him? Oh, hell—can you fucking believe _it_?” Ottavio grins. His chapped lips pin her tangled bangs against her feverish forehead. “So, _cara,_ you are free. Really free. Your American Athena has come through for you.”

He always calls Melinda that, and in English: The American Athena, her Greek-American goddess of wisdom, the arbiter of her fate. She is a fucked-up Odysseus at the mercy of a power that lay entirely outside of her. Everything she had been told before, everything she once believed lays within her, murky and moribund as the canals running through the city, sinking and settling under the weight of revelation. Ottavio was no longer more beautiful than she. And she had not come out of this unscathed. Sofia, her ever-spiteful Tiresias, had confirmed this earlier in the day, in the very words that had sent her reeling out the door: _You had to fall in love with her, you fool. I knew you would. I knew it the first time you fucked her, I knew it the moment you told me she made you come._  

When daylight barges through the rickety blinds—like bad guests arriving too late, and bearing nothing but appetite—Francesca braces herself for the aching emptiness of sober clarity. Ottavio and his friends are gone. An empty wine bottle abuts her right boot, bumping with every twitch of her foot. Marcella is stretched along the couch, drooling and snoring into her pillow, which happens to be Francesca’s jean-clad thigh. The Moroccan in his caftan floats across the room to make coffee. The bitter, pungent smell of opiates hangs in the air, as dismal as Christmas lights out of season. 

Was it all really true, or part of the fantastic hallucination of the previous night? No, she believes it; it had been hinted at in previous assignations, in the glint of those blue eyes that, to Francesca’s shock, had contemplated her and her situation with calm compassion and finally attained a depth of vision beyond ghosts. Certainly that is one way of seeing it, she thinks dourly. It does not explain the needling anger, the chasm of pain and regret that pushes her off the couch and out the door. Again, she reels.

Outside, swaddled in the overcast damp of the morning—no, _matitudinal_ damp—she knows that, despite a mind mirroring the day’s thick lethargy, despite her lagging English (and did it matter?—Melinda would argue just as eloquently in Italian), there is no place to go but to the hotel, for the inevitable confrontation. Sunlight hedges around an embankment of clouds, and the morning palette shifts into typically Venetian gilded grays. Morning, matitudinal. The _Lolita_ passage drifts back to her: _How smugly would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves—_

She would be awake for hours now, Francesca thinks: listening to Bach or Corelli (she prefers Baroque in the morning), drinking her tea (Darjeeling), reading the morning paper (usually the _Corriere Della Sera_ , sometimes the _International Herald Tribune_ if in the mood for her native language), safely ensconced by her books and her past, surely not expecting a haggard-looking, lovesick whore to barge past the sleepy hotel staff and bang on her door, uninvited and demanding an answer to the question _who the fuck do you think you are?_

In reality, Melinda Pappas looks hardly surprised at this unexpected morning visit; perhaps it was a byproduct of those legendary, finely ingrained Southern manners that she mentions from time to time, denouncing their insidious influence in a tone of genteel resignation that confirms their very dominance. Perhaps she correctly anticipated the reaction her gift would bring. Regardless she is not dressed for company—she answers the door barefoot and in a dressing robe, her graying hair loose around her shoulders, reading glasses curled in a loose fist. Having spent half her life living with and loving a woman who was the walking definition of volatile, Melinda quickly sizes up the state of the situation and pulls Francesca into the room before the first angry _fuck_ can fly out of her mouth.

“Don’t make a scene,” she softly admonishes as the door closes. Then, with almost maternal concern: “You look tired.”

Francesca rubs her eyes. A mistake, she realizes, it was a mistake to come to the hotel. She has no advantage here except for rage and love, two coeval states that draw so much energy from one another that she runs on nothing but fumes. “What the fuck do you care?”

“I’m not allowed to care for you?” Melinda is careful not to sound wounded. Not to sound like a real lover.

“It is not the same. You fucking know this.” Like a chef emboldened with the repeated success of using a incorporating an exotic, powerful spice into a series of recipes, she had become quite adept at kneading _fuck_ into her soft, doughy English. She has no idea how pleased Janice Covington would have been with such a linguistic development.

Melinda, on the other hand, unable to disguise her impatience and frustration with obscenities, winces with grudging distaste. It is _a failure, not exactly of language, but of where we have taken language,_ she had written several years ago, in a journal that Francesca would read several years later: _To surrender to the coarsest of words to describe the simplest functions of human existence…it creates a world where fucking triumphs over lovemaking, where God damns the everyday slights of a stranger bumping into you or a broken umbrella during a rainstorm. The act of defecation becomes shit, becomes the ugliness that reigns over every injustice. How further away from perfection—a synthesis of our physical existence with the intellectual and the spiritual—do we drift?_

Not consciously aware that her slow surrender has already commenced, Francesca yields to the simple restraint of plain speech sans obscenity: “I told you that I did not want your money. I told you—I can’t do this any more.” Even in this moment of anguish she is silently astonished at her success in using a contraction. To her ears a contraction in English always sounded as if the language were somehow broken—a wheel had come off, an oar had slipped into the canal. It comes with ease now, this broken state.

Melinda pauses, searching carefully for— _what else?_ Francesca thinks bitterly—the right words. “I know why you don’t want it. I understand. But the money I have given you, I don’t need. But you need it. It will you do you a world of good.” Her eyes hold the intensity of her beliefs: those seemingly antiquated ideas about innate goodness, in simple acts that transform and spark the divinity that resides in everyone. “You can be anything you want now. You can do whatever you want. 

“No. What I feel for you is—” The words thicken in her throat. “—is pure. _Purezza._ ” Even in her native tongue, she nearly stumbles over the word _,_ as if expecting God to strike her dead for even suggesting that this yearned-for state could touch upon her existence. “It is the closest thing to purity that I have in my life. Do _you_ understand? You think you are giving me a favor, but instead you remind me of the filth that I am.”

“You are not filth,” Melinda replies with such quiet, authoritative calmness that for one sweet, clear moment Francesca almost believes it.

Almost. She tries to stem the flow of tears, tries to keep the pain from leeching out of her voice. “I—I can’t take your money.”

“Yes. You can.”

“No.” Francesca’s fist clenches, helplessly empty, fingers reflexive around air. If her intent is to strike something—the wall, the door, this woman she claims to love—the moment passes, her surrender is complete when Melinda wraps a placating hand around her knuckles and kisses her with more affection than ever; the American Athena is nothing if not munificent in victory. Francesca knows they will end up in bed once again, if only because the body cannot cease the delusional power of its convictions, that it alone dictates and determines the hopeless rhythms of love. So she returns the kiss with fervor, her tongue thrust into familiar sweet darkness. Her fist unfurls, as does her desire, and in what follows every gesture is inseparable from love and insensate in its blind satisfaction. In bed they move together in concurrent pasts, as easily disparate as the abandoned clothes on the floor. With every variation upon a kiss, a caress, a position, Francesca wonders what memory Melinda might be attempting to reclaim—a time in Venice or Cambridge, Alexandria or London? _The time she first begged for you, the time she allowed you to bind her wrists to a bedpost? The time she first used a dildo on you and you scared her because it brought tears to your eyes, she thought she had hurt you, but rather you cried because you were liberated and lost all at once?_

_This time, that time. So many times._

Love is a fight for the right kind of dominance, or so Francesca believes. By giving pleasure first, by falling in love first—surely there must be an advantage to be found. Not surprisingly, she now knows Melinda’s body better than anyone else’s, knows when to be rough, when to be gentle, when to give, when to tease. She cups her lover’s mound—if only in the sanctity of her own mind can she think of Melinda as her lover—her hand sweeps across wet folds, her fingers hesitate if only because she must take a moment to stabilize the contagion of arousal stealing through her veins that makes her legs clench tight and sweet around Melinda’s twitching thigh. _Very unprofessional, that,_ says the Cockney angel, that spiritual embodiment of the Tadzio in her.

Melinda shivers, breath raw against Francesca’s neck, as those fingers fit inside her like a missing puzzle piece, the one piece that binds the mystery to the promise of satisfaction, of revelation. With both hands digging into the mattress, she comes. Her breathing shifts, her eyelids flutter in surrender, a reprobate yielding to prayer. She will not sleep, Francesca knows, at least not for long; her exhaustion is fleeting, but it is now, in the pinnacle of afterglow, that she feels so keenly the presence of her ghosts.

What were the words the Moroccan had said, those words that so futilely encompassed Coltrane’s native language? _Acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance, and psalm._ Should have written them down, she thinks. Spelling errors be damned. Futilely, she stirs—the jeans on the floor, their pockets overflowing with paper scraps and stolen pens, seem so far away. She falls back onto the pillow. Tears glide across her temples and dampen her hair.

Awake, Melinda whispers something—in German, Francesca thinks, while bitterly marveling that she can even make that clunky, cumbersome language silkily seductive. Her hand flows with idle confidence over Francesca’s body, over the peaks of her breasts, the dip of her stomach, the thighs tense and aching with the bare restraint of lust. Release will be granted, but not soon enough. She kisses Francesca’s shoulder before her head falls against the pillow for a moment’s respite.

“ _Du mußt dein Leben ändern,_ ” she murmurs, her voice rich with phantoms and fatigue.

It was many years later she realized that Melinda was quoting Rilke. And, perhaps, was not even speaking to her at all.

 

 

**2\. Tadzio of the Alleys**

_1992, Sorrento and Venice_  

I began the book the morning after the first night.

Wait, that’s not true; it only sounds good. Let’s try this: When my eyes were not trained in euphoric contemplation of a sleeping, naked woman in a strange hotel room in a foreign town, I skimmed the pages of the book, occasionally encountering a jarring collision with meaning, as if certain words held the effectiveness of bumper cars encountered at the county fair: _love, whore, streets, first, fire, desire, money._ Beyond outright possession, the book was truly hers—she wrote it. During dinner she had mentioned this in a very offhand way, as if people writing books banned by the Vatican were an everyday occurrence, but perhaps that’s the case in Italy. The reason for her trip to Sorrento, she explained, was not merely to promote the translation among the Amalfi coast’s expatriate community. Her publisher, Carlo, was trying to get her a “audience” with the pope who really mattered, at least among the aforementioned expatriates and the international literary community: Gore Vidal, who lived in the nearby town of Ravello.

Francesca was not optimistic that the meeting—and the presumed blessing—would occur; she liked humoring Carlo, however, and I liked that about her. She quietly fed the illusions of those around her—a quality of a good writer. But the quality of a good lover? The wry, sensual curve of her mouth, optimally appreciated as it touched a wine glass, vouched for that.

So that morning, feigning both interest in the book and comfort in my own nudity, I sat on the bed as she slept. I already knew her story, and frankly I preferred the story incarnate to the book: Francesca, the sheets lapping at her body in sex-scented, cream-colored waves. Several years ago during my first trip to Italy, I saw a statue of the Borghese Hermaphroditus, a first-century marble of a sleeping hermaphrodite sprawled on their belly, at the Palazzo Massimo in Rome; the form beautifully contorted so that the genitalia peeked out just so like the delicate stamen of a flower, the head pillowed gently on forearms, the plundering caress of a serpentine line down the middle of the back. Since then I’ve been haunted by this piece. Just when I think I’ve forgotten it, I encounter it somewhere else—there are copies in the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Vatican. Apparently over a course of several generations artists and admirers and collectors never tired of the blend of male and female, classical and deviant, art and artifact. Here at last in Sorrento, I possessed one of my own, in the perfect medium no less, save for that one tiny, negligible detail dangling between the legs. When she woke she sleepily assessed me in the manner of a cat and then stretched, crawled across the bed, yanked the book out of my hands, and tossed it across the room where it ricocheted off a table leg. Then she was wrapped around my leg and, with her face pressed into my neck, whispered Italian against my skin— _adorabile_.

Honestly, I didn’t think she liked me that much. Morning fucks are a glorious encore performed either honorably in love, skillfully in lust. At that time I lacked both the nerve for real love and the expertise of a good lover. 

Several hours later Francesca retrieved the book from the floor, ran a possessive penitent’s hand over it. Almost sheepish, she gave it to me. It was a gift—and also an explanation, she said, a primer on who she was, and who she had been: “I lived it, I wrote it, and now I have read it—in two languages.” She frowned. “I should have translated it myself.” That had been Melinda Pappas’s gift to her: Obsession. The relentless pushing of language’s boundaries, the view that the translation was as much an original work of art as the text in its native tongue. The stunning and surprising intricacy of a lace handkerchief, or a wallpaper or silk so intricate in rich detail that those looking at it lose themselves in daydreams is ordinary craft stealthily elevated to art. In the hands of the right translator—say, some too-tall girl from South Carolina, whose gift would take her farther than she ever imagined—this occurs in language too. Whether Francesca possessed that same gift I can’t say; the book’s translator, a frumpy Englishwoman living in Rome, had been selected by bossy Carlo, who claimed that his petulant author was “too close” to the material to provide a suitable translation.  

The book was read on a pebbled, sun-streaked beach in Capri and would later be reread on trains from Naples to Rome, from Rome to Venice. It was a “tragic lesbian _Pygmalion,_ ” as the _New York Times_ book review went. And “a little overwhelming, yes?” as Francesca had said to me while we waited in the Sorrento train station for a train that would take me to Naples, and with a nod toward the book—the title translated into English as _Tadzio of the Alleys_ —that peeked out of my overstuffed canvas bag. Not unlike the dust swirling in the slanted sunlight through the train station, this rhetorical question remained trapped in my head, in the act of pointless, meandering illumination. It _was_ overwhelming, and the entire enterprise I had undertaken—what lay before me, what I was supposed to do—seemed doomed to failure on one level or another. But the sunlight refracted through those grimy windows also caught Francesca as she moved, laying bare the melancholy of her intent, rendering her blessedly golden and sacredly broken, an angel out of a Fra Angelico painting.

I know I keep comparing her to a piece of art. It’s an occupational hazard. And the hazard of too much worthless education; what am I to do with all the images inside my mind and all the books I’ve read but to make sketchy comparisons to flesh and blood? After Naples and Rome—where I visited my marble hermaphrodite again—I went to Venice, to her, both of them diaphanously draped in the past. 

In the Venetian apartment that I would come to know so very well the books were the first things to be noticed—that anyone would notice, really: They dominated an entire wall. Some sections were tidier than others. Paperbacks were stacked haphazardly, but the revered hardcover books were neatly aligned—jacketed and leather-clad soldiers that, even when tattered, remained at rapt attention. In that apartment what I sought not knowledge but proof: A photo of the benefactor, the original owner of many of these glorious books, the haunted, aging muse behind Francesca’s own book—and the reason that Francesca automatically replied “Columbia, South Carolina” and not New York, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, or even fucking Disneyland when I had asked if there was any place in America that she really wanted to visit. There were pictures aplenty on the dark mantelpiece: her best friend Marcella, Marcella’s children, a giddy group picture with Marcella and others taken at a gay pride festival in Rome, a curled old postcard from Alexandria, and Francesca’s brother Ottavio, steely-eyed, mustachioed, handsome, and now dead two years. But none of _her._ Where, I wondered, would a picture of this revered woman be?

Where else but on the highest bookshelf?

Residing loftily above eye level was my desired proof, among the foxed and faded Loeb classic texts and the leather-bound histories in Greek—that “fucking impossible” language that Francesca could never figure out—and all of them annotated in handwriting as beautifully inscrutable as Melinda Pappas herself had been. It required a stepladder from the kitchen to retrieve the photo from such great heights, and additionally demanded a certain amount of cold-blooded fortitude in this confrontation with the great beauty, even as she now existed only in photos and in memory, in humble black and white and swaddled under a layer of dust. In the photo, and with her glasses dangling from a curled finger, Melinda stares down the camera with myopic intensity and leans with casual intimacy into a handsome, shorter man whose arm wraps possessively around her waist. A Hermes in khaki work clothes, he’s in on the joke, smiling with broad mischief. She, however, smiles with a subtle, cool dominance that perfectly complements the imperious flame of her eyes—remarkably blue eyes, I knew, from those oversaturated, Harvard-sanctioned portrait-studio Kodachrome photos that Dr. Spencer had shown to me. That woman had seemed unreal to me, too carefully poised in dated clothes, like a minor actress out of a 1950s B movie. This woman, and the man standing beside her, are sensually defiant, fortunate travelers in an ancient city, daring all who can see to deconstruct the parody of their pose—that the possessor of this woman’s heart is not the man next to her but the surly photographer “who had finally mastered the f-stop”—this little detail from a postcard Melinda Pappas had deigned to write to her adoring student Matthew Spencer, whose questionable guidance had led me to this place, these women, the morass of the past.

Yes, the woman in this photo was a revelation. I stammered an accusation at Francesca: “She really was gorgeous.”

Amused, Francesca raised an eyebrow. “Did you not read the book?”

“I thought that was the love talking.”

“Ah. But you must remember, when I met her she was much older.”

“Yes, but—a woman like _this_ does not age badly.” It was true, and on this point I could practically quote her own book at her: _When I first saw a photo of her as a younger woman, I was indescribably, unreasonably jealous; that her body had once been perfect in youthfulness was a strange, if perhaps obvious, revelation. I longed to know what her body had been like then, under those elegant clothes, the body that she gave so willingly to the Ghost—not out of lust’s necessary habit, as she did with me, but rather in the purity of love. But in time this perception changed. In general many of my perceptions about her arched like a parabola that encompassed past and present, youth and old age, and everything in between. In her youth, I imagined I saw a hint of arrogance in her mouth, her bearing. She was at that time a woman who had not known loss or hardship—to my mind, half complete. In the end I preferred my Melinda._  

Francesca shrugged in that classic, infuriatingly Italian _what can you do?_ fashion.

“This guy with her—that was her friend that you met?”

“Fayed. He gave me the photograph.”

“He was gorgeous too. Did they ever—?”

“He told me no. It was only a constant and outrageous flirtation to drive her lover mad.”

“Now you’re making her sound like a bitch.” And I sounded jealous. Which would not do.

Francesca shrugged again. “Bitch, goddess, whore. Aren’t we all like that at one time or another?” She swirled the wine in her glass. “But I have all always been a fool for the kindnesses of women.” 

“Speaking of kindnesses.” I nodded at the wineglass. “You haven’t offered me a glass.”

“I didn’t think you wanted any.” Her glance, sharp and sad, prepared me for what was to come. “After all, you’ve come all this way for something far more important than a glass of cheap Valpolicella, haven’t you?”

The British have a wonderful expression for when one has been discovered in nefarious and/or clandestine doings: _You’ve been rumbled_. I believe Dr. Spencer used this expression during one of his many rambling drunken discourses about this undertaking, about Janice Covington, about Melinda Pappas; in fact, he was rather disposed toward employing a clipped British accent during his monologues even though he had grown up in some poky little hamlet near Albany. He had come a long way from rural upstate New York—to a beautiful house and a rewarding career in sunny California. Pottering around in his ostentatious garden, in a (mercifully closed) bathrobe, he had said to me: _Don’t get rumbled, dear. That whore won’t take kindly to finding out the real reason you’re there._

Many year prior, “that whore” hadn’t taken kindly to discovering this plump, pink-cheeked, Brooks Brothers-clad former student of both Covington and Pappas on the doorstep of the villa she was to inherit eventually from her benefactor. Initially his description of this coarse madwoman had led me to anticipate that Francesca would resemble some stereotypical variant upon Anna Magnani, a volatile earth mother with a moustache. Then Dr. Spencer showed me a photo of the slender, blonde Janice Covington (“oh, that lovely hooligan”) and swore that the “grief-crazed Venetian tart” resembled her. During his ill-timed visit to the villa, which had occurred less than two weeks after Melinda’s death, Francesca tolerated both his leering—okay, I’m making that up, but given his rhapsody about Covington’s “callipygian perfection” (“She filled out a skirt magnificently, pity she didn’t wear them more often”) I’m sure he couldn’t help himself because God knows I couldn’t either—not to mention the proprietary sweep of his hands over Melinda’s papers for only so long (“The whore didn’t even have the decency to offer me an espresso”) before chasing him out of the villa with a combination of Covington’s old handgun (“Typically after grading papers, Dr. Covington loved to threaten to shoot us all”) and an empty wine bottle that she threw at his head as he huffed and puffed and stumbled over blackened cobblestone (“In my frantic escape, I twisted my ankle and nearly fell into one of those dreadful canals—you know Katherine Hepburn fell into one while she was filming _Summertime_ and the filthy water gave her an ear infection, and she lost some hearing—you don’t know that movie? Oh God, why does your generation possess the patience of a gnat?”).

And so his plan was hatched, sketched hastily on a imaginary blueprint and built on the seemingly solid foundation of patience: That perhaps once enough time had elapsed her grief would subside (“She may be a whore, but more importantly she’s a Venetian—they love money and all that glitters”) and Francesca would be willing to surrender those valuable documents, particularly to a “lovely creature” such as myself (“Certainly you’re no Melinda Pappas, dear—for one thing, your Greek is absolutely _wretched_ —but you’re sort of tall and dark and handsome and that, I hope, will do”).

Now that I was well and thoroughly rumbled, the foundation crumbled and exposed the shoddy workmanship of Dr. Spencer’s plan. If Francesca suspected how important the journals really were, would she be naïve and foolish enough to give them to me? For money? Or for love? She seemed fond of me, nothing more. Nor was I in love with her. Frankly I realized she was too much a class apart from me, and from Dr. Spencer. We knew art. She created it. What we sought were artifacts. What Francesca possessed were memories of a woman’s life. Both were the same thing, both were desperately desired, but in the end the immutability of Francesca’s love won. 

I sat down on a sofa; it seemed best to conserve energy before she decided I would be escorted from the property much as Dr. Spencer was so many years before. Melinda’s expression in the photo took on a mocking caste: _You didn’t think I’d be fool enough to entrust everything I had, everything I was, to some common lowlife, did you?_ “When did you figure it out?”

“After you left for Rome.” She finished off the wine. “You mentioned living in Los Angeles and, well, my paranoia—“ She shrugged again in that beautiful offhand way, and to my annoyance it hurt. “I remembered Spencer and his connection to the Getty. Carlo is very persistent when I give him a task. He made the phone calls to the museum.” She sought divination and clarity momentarily by gazing into the empty glass—and no sooner had this prompted thoughts of Dr. Spencer, then she further invoked his lumbering carcass: “Your mentor lost his position there.” 

Poor Dr. Spencer. His mania for possessing the antique cost him dearly. “He was just my thesis advisor.” He had wrangled me a fellowship, which stretched itself into a lowly curatorial position, and which was currently in jeopardy thanks to my association with him.

Even in the cool hostility of her gaze, I thought she spared some pity for me in the mocking gentleness of her smile. “Is your thesis about theft, _cara_?”

As a matter of fact, it was (“The Ontologisms of Provenance and the Economics of Place”), but at that moment, with Francesca staring at me in wary disappointment—how many times in life had she been disappointed by love, life, circumstance?—it hardly seemed the point. “Why aren’t you throwing me out on the street? Waving a gun at me? Or at least throwing a bottle at my head?”

“Because,” Francesca drawled, “you are prettier than your misguided mentor. And you are a very good fuck.” If she meant to wound by reducing me to nothing more than a sexual diversion, I didn’t mind; if her idea of punishment was that, I would happily lash myself to the whipping pole. She walked out of the room and a line from the book entered my mind: _She was the type of woman so kind and so refined that, when her cruelty finally asserted itself, she could not believe it had ever existed. Like the drunk who, in the sober light of dawn, discounts the violent ravings of the night before._ She returned not armed with Covington’s gun, as my melodramatic imagination had anticipated, but rather with an old leather-bound journal, safely bundled in plastic, and a pair of white archivist’s gloves. The cracked corners of the journal’s cover shed brown specks like dried blood and as such fragile things tend to do, it made one yearn to touch, to enfold it in a protective, greedy embrace. With careful reverence Francesca placed the journal on the low table in front of me, where the displaced photo of Melinda also sat. It created an impromptu shrine.

“Since you have whored yourself so well”—Francesca drew a breath, as if bracing herself for potentially disastrous consequences—“I will allow you to read one. How could I not reward you?” Why did I flinch from her? “I hope,” she continued, “that you realize there is no way this will physically leave my home. It shall be over my dead body, as they say. Ah!” She sighed, permitting herself a fleeting moment of contentment. “I do love English expressions so.”

“I’m sure Melinda taught you many.” It was foolish to invoke the woman’s name. Like wearing a tin hat during a thunderstorm. And yet here I was, staring at her picture, her journal. Dr. Spencer once said to me, _Sometimes your impulses outrun your intellect_. Perhaps that was another reason why he thought I was fit to send on this insane quest. Perhaps I should have accepted that fellowship at Michigan; surely I would not have gotten into trouble at Ann Arbor.

“Yes,” Francesca retorted softly. “In the American South, I gather, there are many colorful ones. There is one she told me—to my surprise, since she did not like coarse language: ‘Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.’”

In spite of it all I laughed and she smiled tolerantly, as if I were a patient in an institution to be tediously humored and vigilantly observed. Then I slipped on the gloves. I had missed this: my hands sheathed in thin cotton, holding something so rare, the past alive in my grasp. My palms would ache against an amphora, my hands would lovingly cup the empty, delicate belly of a krater. Everyone in conservation trusted me: Feather touch, nerves of steel. Only Dr. Spencer saw beyond that; in me, he had found another fetishist. I opened the thick plastic sleeve and slid one sheathed finger along the rough old leather. Here was what she had to say. Here was all that remained of her—perhaps the most important part of her, she might assert _._ As if seeking a final blessing, I looked once more at the photograph of Melinda. _Here_ she was as well, clear in the past’s chiaroscuro: the fortunate traveler who moved through foreign cities and the multivalent phases of her life with outward grace, who led at least two women into the territory of obsession, who lost great love and, when she had the opportunity to regain it and despite the vastness of her experiences and her intellect, could not fathom its recurrence. Could I possibly feel pity or empathy for someone that gifted? Was the other end of the obsession—with the camera pointed at you—any better?

 

**3\. Where a perfect climate is to be obtained**

_Istanbul, 1956_

_May 19._ It had never occurred to me to keep a personal diary or journal of any kind. I have spent a good deal of my life immersed in reading and writing other people’s words—the sum total significantly more profound than anything I have experienced or lived through—so my thoughts seem fairly trivial and not worth a written record. Lately, however, I find myself wanting to write down the dreams I have at night, because in the aperture of morning they dissolve and as the day fills with activity they’re completely gone, soon forgotten. They are vivid—at least I want to believe they are vivid. Otherwise I’m uncertain of why this compulsion has settled into me.

We’ve been traveling so much I forget at times where I am—another thing that abets the loss of the dreams is that as I wake I start wondering where we are. What city? Where are we headed?

This morning, however, I know exactly where we are: The Bosporus is outside the bedroom window. The Golden Horn, to be more precise, looking not so much golden as thickened with a gray mist that reminds me of London and hides the pearl of the Seraglio Point in generous folds of fog. And on the nightstand is something that wasn’t there last night when I went to bed—a sleek black beauty, perfectly rectangular, crowned by a cheap pink bow: A Leica camera.

It must be my birthday—better yet, it means that she remembered my birthday.

The gravitas of the camera’s satisfying weight in my hand convinces me I could rival Cartier-Bresson as both an artist and a recorder of the human condition (yes, I am still in some state of sleepy euphoria). Ignoring the bulky instruction manual (which serves as a humble ceremonial pillow for the camera on the nightstand)—not to mention my own rigid tendencies to properly research anything before undertaking it (sex, tennis, beef Bourguignon)—I explore, greedily. The lens cap pops like a champagne cork and the tip of my finger, careful not to smudge, runs a cautious lap around the rim of the lens. The ridges of the shutter dial and the rewinding knob nip my skin. The pebbled black body fits into my palm as I gaze through the viewfinder, touch another button, and commit to posterity the very first picture taken with my beloved new camera: a startling and intimate portrait of my bony ankle.

She’s in the doorway now, laughing at me—“You like it?”—hands in pockets, foot nervously bumping against the wood door frame, smiling with cocky shyness. And I wish that this, instead, were the very first photo I’d taken.

Happy Birthday, Leica. It’s your day too.

 

 _May 23._ After photographing everything in sight, she is no longer indulgent with me, as the world of Istanbul is documented in my own eccentric way—alleys, bridges, mosques, men at coffee shops, women behind store counters, baskets of figs, mirrors in the marketplace, a cloud blurred in the reflection of a puddle (my artistic pretensions still exceeding my technical grasp at this point). I suspect, however, that lavishing the Leica’s attention for several long minutes on a scrawny, surly alley cat was the last straw—and so she decides to turn the tables: “Give me the camera. I want to take a picture of you.” 

My grip tightens possessively around the Leica. “You already have plenty of photos of me.”

“Those old photos? You’re always dressed up and have some sort of ape-man on your arm. No,” she continues, “I want something recent, where you look like you. Where you’re smiling.”

I’m usually on the opposite side of the camera, albeit not by choice. Smile! Say cheese! Pretend you’re happy to be clinging to that tuxedoed baboon’s arm, at least! In these photos, in most photos, I’m as graven as a life mask. She’s right, I never look like myself in these pictures. So I surrender.

The camera suddenly appropriated, she fumbles with it. The cigarette in her mouth darts up, down, side to side, as if an antenna seeking guidance from a distant satellite on the proper f-stop, and the burning ash a prism jockeying for the perfect angle of light. When the cigarette juts up in a classic FDR fashion, her jaw line tenses with disappointment and I want to kiss that angry, soft fault line right here in this very public street.

If I can resist the temptation to kiss, I cannot resist the temptation to meddle: “Let me.” 

“I can do it.”

“I know. Just let me fix the settings for you.”

“If you’d give me a goddamn minute—”

I give her a goddamn minute, and more. Many more. Despite the anxious flutter of my stomach, I say nothing even when it becomes painfully obvious that she thinks the rewind knob will adjust the viewfinder. How on earth did she ever get the film into the camera before she gave it to me? She must have bribed the shop owner! Finally, I can take no more and hold out my hand: “Here.”

She relents, but not without a growl of “aw, screw it.”

“You’d think it was trigonometry, from the way you’re carrying on about it. Honestly.” But perhaps there is a kind of trigonometry at work—calculating the triad of relationships among the photographer, the subject, the camera itself. The beloved, the lover, the conduit. But where does the perfect sphere of memory, embodied in the photograph itself—an elegant proof of love—intersect all this? I almost begin blathering this aloud, but I look up and she is scowling at me. She never takes well to teasing about her intelligence. 

We reach a détente when I return the Leica to her. “Go on, then.”

Her expression softens into contrition; she looks at the camera with a new wonder, as if thinking, Yes, why did it seem so complicated? “Okay now.” She clears her throat, aims the Leica. “Smile—”

I smile fraudulently.

“—and say—”

My face twitches anxiously.

“—‘fuck you, asshole.’”

I don’t. But I laugh, and that is precisely what she wants.

 

 _May 23, evening._ Is a love of travel genetic? Perhaps. It all started with the postcards that, for a time, crossed my doorstep more regularly than my father did. If it sounds as if I blame him for something—well, that is how the truth slants, I suppose, but if not for his absences I wouldn’t have had a scrapbook of postcards from around the world. My favorite had been the one he sent back from Cairo, of the Nile saturated in vermillion sunset with one long, low skiff gliding along the river. “Spend this winter in Egypt,” the card proclaimed, “where a perfect climate is to be obtained.” On the back my father wrote: _We’re “holed up” in Cairo for longer than expected—Ralph has dysentery. Bad last week but he’s getting better and we should be off in a few days. Darling I hope you’re being a good girl and studying hard. I’ve grown a frighteningly big beard and you wouldn’t recognize me!_

In college, that postcard had been tacked up over my desk and whenever I tired of books and boys I would seek it out like a talisman—even if I were not in my own rooms at the time, I would see it clearly in my mind—to remind me I would not be in school forever, that perhaps like my father, I would travel, I would get away. Not from any place specifically, mind you, but from myself. I would get away from being me.

We are not in Egypt yet, still Istanbul. Soon, she says. This one word from her encompasses in meaning any time period from a couple of hours to a couple of months. Days. Years. I’m not quite sure it matters, because I have achieved my freedom.

 

 _May 24._ At Istanbul’s city wall a crumbling tower catches my eye and once again the Leica is in front of my face like a boxy Venetian mask. 

“Oh Christ, here we go again,” she moans. 

I can hide behind the camera. It thrills me.

Within the rangefinder are the frame lines’ decorous scars, a constant reminder of what will be severed from any given photo, of the seemingly simple fact that taking a picture is not merely about the image but also, its presentation. About what is not there.

So I swerve—pivoting the lens and panning away from the castle across a landscape of ruinous stone and moss, slowly, as if I am directing a film, rehearsing a shot. Like a director seeking out his leading lady, von Sternberg looking for his Dietrich.

And there she is. Instinctively her eyes narrow and her lips tighten into grim beauty before she realizes I will not move away, and she relaxes into herself. The change is almost imperceptible, the elegant proof of love almost incalculable, but it is there—distinct in the whispering kiss of the shutter release, the softest that I’ve ever heard.

 


End file.
